Of course, that’s just an approximation…

Flashback to the 1970s, when this college student pilot fish works nights as a computer operator -- and he gets to use the big machine for his homework, too."My calculus professor asked us to write a Fortran program to simulate a Monte Carlo method ...

Flashback to the 1970s, when this college student pilot fish works nights as a computer operator -- and he gets to use the big machine for his homework, too.

"My calculus professor asked us to write a Fortran program to simulate a Monte Carlo method of determining the area under a graph," says fish. "You have a formula that, for a given input, tells you whether your result lies above or below a less-than-typical plot line. You run the formula using a random set of inputs, then count what percentage of 'hits' are below the line. That is then used to approximate the area under the curve.